Anxious to Know

(This is an explication I wrote from my Environmental Literature class to a quote from Barry Lopez's article "Rediscovering North America")

“We’re anxious now to know what the land has to say to us, how it responds to our use of it.”

When we are children, if we are lucky, we hear stories about the Native American tribes in North America. If we are even more fortunate, we hear about their lifestyles, beliefs, traditions, and relationships with each other and the land around them. But most of us didn’t, and if we did, we ignored their wisdom for our own western version and quickly forgot the teachings. If, sometime later in our adult life, we hear these stories again, we find ourselves equating them with an idealistic painting of Native America. The image is nice, but we know that our culture is too far gone in a different direction to turn back to an indigenous lifestyle.

But is it?

Barry Lopez, in his essay “Rediscovering North America” makes a brilliant case for the possibility of change in our culture. He acknowledges “one of our deepest frustrations as a culture…must be that we have made so extreme an investment in mining the continent, created such an infrastructure of nearly endless jobs predicated on the removal and distribution of trees, water, minerals, fish, plants, and oil, that we cannot imagine stopping.” It is important to acknowledge this frustration because it means that we are upset. We aren’t happy with our current lifestyle and want to change. Though we don’t necessarily understand how, the desire, yearning, and willingness is with us.

When Lopez writes a few pages earlier “we are anxious now to know what the land has to say to us” he is describing a shift in thought. For several centuries—he places the date at 1492—western culture has viewed the land as a possession. Now we are slowly returning back and taking our thoughts in a different direction of treating the land as companion or person. In his line “we are anxious now to know what the land has to say to us” Lopez also offers a teacher in which we can learn from. Indigenous people often viewed themselves as one with the land. They wouldn’t have thought to distinguish between their bodies and an oak tree near their home or the canyon they hunted in. So when Lopez says that we can listen to the land, he is also suggesting we listen to the indigenous tribes of North America as they can be seen as the same.

Listening will not always be an easy task. We will hear stories that go against beliefs we were raised with and stories that urge us to change lifestyles we have grown accustomed to. And in these stories, we will also hear the truth of our culture and its impact on the earth. The land, the people, will “respond to our uses of it.” It will be difficult to hear, but we can endure its tale. We will listen because we are frustrated and anxious to hear a story other than our own.